This past weekend marked four decades since my Mom and my late one-time stepfather (though not quite in 1977) Maurice moved me and my older brother from South Side Mount Vernon to an apartment complex three blocks from the Mount Vernon-Pelham border. This is much more a memorial of remembrance than of anything to celebrate.

For me, it was part of an endless series of storms. Mom had filed for divorce with my father and had decided to move in with her allegedly new boyfriend Maurice (who wasn’t so new, as I’d learn years later). My father Jimme’s alcoholism had gotten worse. He had drowned my Mom’s clothes in a bathtub, thrown a color TV out of our second-floor window, and stomped in a glass coffee table during dinner after my seventh birthday in response to the cheating and the divorce. My Mom ended up in the hospital for two months due to the stress and her kidneys, which had almost shut down due to her nonexistent diet. Add to all this the sexual abuse that I had suffered while Mom and Jimme were going at it during the centennial summer of ’76. My world was upside down, in shambles, as shattered as glass blown out of a skyscraper by well-placed plastic explosives.

A week ago, my thirteen-year-old son asked me, “Did you ever live in a house?” Even though I had talked about my life before the move to 616 East Lincoln Avenue before, it had been a few years. I think my son asked because of our plans to move out of our “luxury” high-rise after fourteen years. The truth is, I have lived in four homes over the years. But in my first seven years (with 240 East Third as a notable exception during my Mom’s illness), I grew up in three houses: 24 Adams Street, 48 Adams Street, and 425 South Sixth Avenue. We lived in one-bedroom flats in the first two homes, where we shared a kitchen and a bathroom with one other family. I have memories of playing in the front yards of both, of older neighbors (by toddler standards) hosing down their cars, of older kids and teenagers at the Adams Street Park on monkey bars and shooting hoops. I even remember the day my Mom told me we were moving to 425 South Sixth, August 12, 1974. It was the same week I burned my knee on an over door, the same week Richard Nixon announced his resignation from the presidency.

At 425, we had a two-bedroom, one-bath flat, on the second floor, with a separate entrance. It was as close to owning a home as we got during those years. And boy did my Mom and Jimme blow it! Between the sexual abuse incident and my unconscious attempts at self-erasure, even suicide, 425 never quite felt like home.

The move to 616 occurred about a week after my Uncle Sam clotheslined my father like he was the late Deacon Jones and Jimme was a running back whose career was coming to a crashing halt. I remember it being the second Friday in April, near Easter Sunday time. It had warmed up from the frozen winter of ’77 to the light chills of early spring. But I didn’t feel particularly warmed up inside.

It didn’t help that where we end up moving didn’t look at all like the newer — if more impoverished — series of apartment complexes down the street on Pearsall Drive. It wasn’t the first time I’d been in an apartment building. But from the first time I walked into the A section of 616, I didn’t like it. The vestibule was too dark, the elevator too slow, and the building too smelly for my tastes. Plus, because of the haste of the move and the damage my father had done to our furniture, me and my older brother Darren didn’t even have a bed. From April to December ’77, we slept on the floor or on the couch in the new living room or in our eventual bedroom, with Mom and Maurice staying up sometimes until Johnny Carson time watching sitcoms and the news. So many times in those first months, I felt like I was a rag doll that had been hurriedly thrown into a box marked “Miscellaneous.” I was along for whatever ride Mom and Maurice were on, a permanent reminder of yesterday’s marital storms, a yoke on whatever future they had in mind.

I acted out repeatedly the first twenty months after the move. I chewed on a red-and-blue-striped t-shirt until I had swallowed about a third of it. I began biting and eating my nails until I made the skin underneath bleed. I stuffed sandwiches into the holes I made in my coats, and ate every booger my nose could expel as a substitute for lunch. That’s how much I hated Mom, Maurice, myself, my life, and 616 forty years ago.

Mom and Maurice tried to explain it away as simple selfish jealousy, that as a soft mama’s boy, I wanted Mom to myself. That’s only about twenty or twenty-five percent accurate. What I did know was that Maurice wasn’t my dad, yet Mom foisted him on us as if Jimme had died and none of us had any other choice. What I did know was that I was hurting, and since I was getting an ass-whuppin’ about once a week, I couldn’t lash out. What I did know was that not a single neighbor or kid in the building, especially the Bagleys, welcomed our presence in the building or my existence at 616.

With what I’ve learned about Mom, Maurice, Jimme, myself, and my neighbors since ’77, it’s a wonder I didn’t go up to the roof and just throw myself off it those first two years, or in ’82, ’83, or ’84. God knows I ran away enough, got beat up enough times, and was called “faggot” often enough to see slamming myself into the slate sidewalk leading to 616’s front stairs as a better alternative to living. College was the first opportunity I got to get away from this living hell, and I took full advantage.

Mom and my two youngest siblings still live at 616. The youngest barely remembers the end of the abuse and chaos that I lived through and Mom put up with. The other sibling has horrible memories of his own. After the fire at 616 in ’95, when Mom asked me for advice about where to move after the renovations, I told her, “Anywhere but back to 616.” Mom, as nearly always, didn’t listen to me. I guess misery is as addicting as anything else.

President Richard Nixon delivering his resignation speech (cropped screen shot) ahead of impeachment over Watergate, abuse of power, August 8, 1974. (http://washingtonpost.com). In public domain.

I have a deeply personal perspective from which I saw President Richard Nixon’s resignation forty years ago. It’s a perspective that has ordered my steps nearly every day for the past four decades. If it weren’t for a kitchen accident and his televised resignation speech, I probably wouldn’t be the person I am today, or the person I’ve been over the past 14,610 days. Nixon and my kitchen accident combined to “pop my memory cap,” to quote a line from the original Total Recall (1990) starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

That Thursday evening, August 8, ’74, was the very first time I became continually self-aware, forming memories like a video camera records scenes, with thoughts of myself and the world around me. I didn’t understand everything I saw, of course. But I did know that I saw what I saw, and for more than just a few moments.

Seeing Nixon’s big head on my Mom’s 19-inch color Zenith wasn’t my first memory, though. I remember crawling by my Mom’s TV set in ’72 at our second-floor flat in which we shared a kitchen with another family in Mount Vernon, NY. I remember because it was the first time I’d seen numbers, the numbers being 1972 with a copyright symbol in front of it. (I told a graduate student friend of mine about this first memory once – she told me it would be impossible for me as a two-year-old to remember specific numbers. What did she know?) I also remember the closing theme song from the show that was on immediately before Another World, which I figured out in later years was NBC’s other soap opera Days of Our Lives.

Two other memories prior to August 8, ’74 stand out. One was me escaping from the front yard at 48 Adams Street and walking down the block to the local asphalt playground, with basketball hoops and jungle gym included. I remember playing with much older boys, having fun, and my Mom whupping me from the playground all the way down the block back to the house. The other was when our babysitter Ida bathed me and my older brother Darren in a tub full of scolding hot water with Tide Detergent. I was so angry, I called her a “Bitch!” Angry likely because I was itching all over, the b-word likely because my Mom and my father Jimme used the word like it was a period to end a sentence. Miss Ida backhanded me like I was going cross-court as a tennis ball at the US Open. All of this happened when I was three.

The flood gates opened the following summer of ’74, though. It started because of a traumatic injury. My Mom was cooking in the shared kitchen at 48 Adams, making some kind of chicken dish. She had the oven door open, having just taken the chicken out of it and having placed it on the stove. I asked her if I could have a bite. Of course my Mom said, “No, Donald, it’s too hot!” I didn’t listen. I tried to climb up to the top of the stove by using the open oven door as a step stool, and lo and behold, I scorched my right leg when I put it on the inside of the door. I remember my Mom screaming, “Oh my God!” as I fell to the floor, screaming along with her.

My second-degree leg burn, 40 years later – darker area circled is faded mark that was once on the right side of my right calf, August 5, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins).

The skin around the burn area was gone (if it had happened today, it would’ve been a pretty good second-degree burn, and I probably would’ve ended up at the hospital), leaving a white — not pink, white — circular burn mark. My Mom applied ointment and a bandage, made me take two Bayer aspirin for the pain, and told me to calm down and be quiet. She plopped me down on the couch in the living room, which was slightly to the right of the TV.

I was still crying in pain from the shock of seeing, smelling and feeling my skin being seared in the kitchen. As my Mom sat me down, a man with a gigantic head appeared on the television screen, a man I vaguely knew as the President of the United States. I really didn’t understand much of what President Nixon said, but I do recall my Mom shaking her head, and Cronkite calling it a “sad time” for the country. Given how sad I already felt, I think I might have felt sorry for the man with the big head on the TV set.

From that moment on, I’ve had continual memories. I remember my Mom taking me to Darren’s Headstart program somewhere around South 2nd or South 3rd Avenue in Mount Vernon the next day to pick him up, seeing the man with the big head wave with his fingers sticking in the air before going on a helicopter ride, and then being dragged to Met Grocery Store on South Fulton Avenue for groceries, all with a painfully sore leg. Luckily, my Mom caught us a cab home.

And the week after that, we moved to 425 South Sixth, next to Nathan Hale Elementary, where I would go to kindergarten the following month. And the week after that, my father Jimme introduced Darren to The Clear View School, after an argument with my Mom about him “drinkin’ up all his money again.” Ah, the parallels between big historical events and key moments in my life haven’t stopped since!

A flat at 48 Adams Street in Mount Vernon, New York. Followed by one at 24 Adams Street. Then 48 Adams Street again. Then the entire second floor of the house at 425 South Sixth Avenue. After that, a 1,200-square-foot apartment on the third floor of the front building of the 616 East Lincoln Avenue

48 Adams Street, circa 2006

complex. After going to Pittsburgh for college, a dorm room at Lothrop Hall my freshman year. Five days of Howard Johnson’s and sleeping on a concrete landing on the fifth floor in a stairwell at Forbes Quadrangle (now Wesley Posvar Hall) the beginning of my sophomore year. A poorly partitioned one-room flat with a shared kitchen and bathroom in a firetrap for a row house, 25 Welsford Avenue, the rest of my sophomore and all of my junior years at Pitt.

The above is every place I’ve lived during my first twenty years on the planet. I never felt at home in any of those places, and when I’d come close, something violent or life changing would occur to remove that feeling of at least a sense of minor uneasiness. Alcoholism, domestic violence, divorce, second marriage, financial pressures, religious stupidity, more domestic violence and abuse, more siblings, financial collapse, college, homelessness, lack of funds and privacy defined the spaces in which I lived between ’69 and ’90. I was mostly lonely and yet hardly alone for all of those years. I had about as much space to think and write as I would’ve had in a bathroom stall at Grand Central before the renovations there during the ’90s (a story for another post). Which is why most of my Mount Vernon classmates and friends can testify to dozens of “Donald sightings” — me walking everywhere — between the ages of twelve and eighteen.

I made the decision after my junior year to find my own place, my own space, as close to or as far away from Pitt’s campus as I could. I took a week off from my summer job at Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health in White Plains at the beginning of August ’90 and took the express Greyhound to the ‘Burgh. I stayed with my friend Terri and her mother — a blog post unto itself — while looking all over the city and its po’ White and Black trash suburbs for anything between $150 and $300 a month in rent, one with my own kitchen and bath.

I found a nice place in Wilkinsburg, only discouraged by the distance it was from the East Busway (Pittsburgh elected in ’64 to spend twenty years building a busway instead of a subway to connect downtown with the suburbs — talk about being cheap!) and Pitt. Not to mention feeling uneasy about a slightly older next door neighbor who looked like she caroused a bit too much. I looked at places in Shady Side, Squirrel Hill, Highland Park, North Oakland, off Braddock Road and near Frick Park, even the Manchester and Friendship neighborhoods (somewhere between middle class, affluent, and student housing). The rent was either too rich for me or the places looked a bit run down.

Finally, on my next to last day to look, I found a place at 6007 Penn Circle South in East Liberty, right

across from the Shady Side neighborhood. It was a one-room efficiency (calling it a “studio” would make it sound better than it was). I had a kitchenette area with a sink, counter, cabinets, a stove and oven with a ventilation fan, and a fridge. I had my own bathroom and enough closet space for my meager clothes and toiletries. I was within walking distance of Giant Eagle, the big grocery store in the area, as well as the busway. The Highland Park Zoo bus, the 71B, as well as the 71C, ran their way to Oakland and Pitt. And Pitt was within my walking distance back then — it was more than two and a half miles from Penn Circle South to the Cathedral of Learning.

It was $220 if rent for each month was paid before the first day of the month, and $245 if not. I took the 450-square-foot flat, this despite some of the riff-raff living in the building, the hole-in-the-wall bar Constantine’s within a couple of blocks, or Kelly’s Bar for the down and out across the street. The heating and cooling, the toilet and shower, the food in my fridge was all mine. My friends Kenny, Elaine, Marc all thought it was a dump. Maybe so, especially compared to the places I’ve lived since. But it was my dump. Those eight and a half years there, I learned so much about myself and life and God and women and love. I learned how to live my life while I was in apartment 204. That began twenty years ago today. The building’s now gone (at least, it was slated to be), but the memories remain.

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